6. Top tips from industry trailblazers

We asked our industry trailblazers to share their top tips on hiring dyslexic thinking talent. Here's what they said.

The benefits of hiring dyslexic thinking talent is critical. In fact, I would say, it's a strategic imperative.

If you think about the era we're in now of talent shortages and also an era of incredible technological change, the importance of human skills becomes so much more significant for every company's success. If I think about skills like resilience or I think about empathy, listening skills, creativity, communication, and innovation, these are all skills that dyslexics excel at. And they're critical skills for every company to be successful for the future.

We find many of our staff with dyslexia can simplify really complex problems and processes. They can work collaboratively, and they can make connections between different concepts, often at extraordinary speed.

And often when dealing with a fast pace or complicated threats to the UK, we need to be able to spot that needle in a haystack. That crucial piece of information in a huge data set.

And dyslexia yields strength in higher order reasoning skills. So dyslexics can better notice visual anomalies. They see things that are out of place in that bigger picture.

You can couple that kind of human thinking with AI in all kinds of AI, agentic, as it's coming, and really have a significant difference of outputs. And we see in many organisations that we work with, the way we're designing work is changing, and the outcomes of that work require that human and machine connection.

Dyslexics are really well-positioned to do that combination because of the way that their skills and their brain works. And so if you are filtering that out, you are fundamentally damaging the ability to get better outcomes of work, power the growth in your organisation, and really make sure there's both efficiencies and effectiveness in what you're trying to achieve.

So as the workplace is evolving, it's really critical that we look at skills that individuals can bring rather than their qualifications. We need to be responding as an organisation to the changes that are around us. And we've got to think about the skills and experiences that people can bring. And we know with dyslexic thinkers, they bring those different levels of creativity and different perspectives that we so value.

And we help our leaders make sure that they're making the right decisions around looking at people skills, not some of the barriers around qualifications. So we're delighted that all of our managers, both at Virgin Group and many of our other Virgin companies, have actively been trained on the Made By Dyslexia Workplace Training. It's really increased their awareness, their thoughtfulness about how they do go and make those critical recruitment decisions and ensure that they bring those critical skills into the business.

We've seen many leaders, many entrepreneurs, many innovators have not come through the traditional route of qualifications and that standard education. In fact, our founder proves the point.

The unique nature of intelligence work means you can't learn it anywhere else. You can't have a qualification. So we're always looking to hire for potential and for skills and for aptitude, rather than for qualifications. If you bring those, we can teach you the rest.